Age as a price in games

[Segev]

I'm gonig to try to keep this relatively broad, though my specific inspiration for it stems from a moderately-common trope I've seen in some fantasy: namely the idea that using magic makes you age faster. (Chaos magic from the Recluse series and Mages from Denis L. McKiernan's Midkemia novels are two examples.) Conversely, in response to this, I'd positted to myself a magic system where the price of magic was the opposite: one gets younger the more magic one uses (and thus can recover from it, but it takes time - literally - to do so).

But just in general, "do this and it will cost X years of your life" or similar age-related costs come up in fantasy at times.

Modeling this in a game, however, is tricky. Sure, one-time curses are okay. "You age 10 years" is bad, but given that the game is still likely to only last a few in-setting years, it has minimal impact on actual playability of the character (provided this doesn't push age categories into uncomfortable stat adjustments).

But what if it's meant to be a resource that players can shepherd or use to fuel PC abilities? Whether it's magic, or a non-recoverable cost to make a particular power all the more precious and restrictive to use, or it's just some factor with which your setting plays, how much would things have to cost, and on what scale, to make it both playable and still a resource to be managed carefully?

It might be easier to treat it with the "get younger as you use it" perspective, because at least there's a built-in recovery mechanism. (You spent 1 year of age on that spell? You'll have it back in a year.)

But what would be reasonable "rates" to "charge" for varying levels of effect? How much and on what scale would the charges have to be for it to be enough to worry about spamming, but not so much that using it "reasonably" while on an adventure doesn't amount to permanently exhausting the character's resources insofar as the game's timeframe goes? (Sure, the mage who cast himself back into pubescence might recover in a decade, but the game's only going to last a few months of in-setting time.)

How would you scale it?

[Ashtagon]

In AD&D 1st edition, casting a haste spell aged the target by three years. Wish aged the caster by ten years iirc.

I once contemplated this as a means to kill troublesome NPCs.

[Maglubiyet]

It doesn't sound like much of a price to me. In a world like that I don't see how you would ever have mages old enough to cast more than a couple spells. As soon as any of them started feeling the effects of aging they would cast a spell or two to get back to an optimum. You would end up with a class of immortal, perpetually 25-year-olds.

[Thrudd]

It doesn't sound like much of a price to me. In a world like that I don't see how you would ever have mages old enough to cast more than a couple spells. As soon as any of them started feeling the effects of aging they would cast a spell or two to get back to an optimum. You would end up with a class of immortal, perpetually 25-year-olds.

There isn't such a spell. They could try to craft potions that will reduce your age, but every time you drink one after the first, there's an increasing chance that it will have the reverse effect and age you a number of years equal to all those you had recovered via potions in the past!

[NichG]

I'm currently running a game where every three sessions there's always a 15 year time-skip. So I suppose aging would actually be a reasonable price in that campaign. Methods of extending life expectancy are pretty common for PCs in that game however (and there's an advancement mechanism tied to dying anyhow), so it'd be more of a price for NPCs.

[Segev]

It doesn't sound like much of a price to me. In a world like that I don't see how you would ever have mages old enough to cast more than a couple spells. As soon as any of them started feeling the effects of aging they would cast a spell or two to get back to an optimum. You would end up with a class of immortal, perpetually 25-year-olds.

There isn't such a spell. They could try to craft potions that will reduce your age, but every time you drink one after the first, there's an increasing chance that it will have the reverse effect and age you a number of years equal to all those you had recovered via potions in the past!

I think Maglubiyet's referring to "casting spells reduces your age" when he says it's not much of a price.

He's hitting on the dichotomy I'm seeing, as well, but he's missing that it's to conflicting extrema. If casting spells doesn't reduce your age by a lot, then mages just do it regularly and, if they feel themselves getting too old, cast some big ones or a ton of little ones to get back to a comfortable mid-20s. If it invariably costs a lot, then you never have mages who have more than a few spells "available" at a time...and then they have to wait inordinate amounts of time to be able to do it again.

AD&D did, indeed, have those spell effects; it meant fighters actually didn't want Haste all that much. (Though I recall Haste only being 1 year.) Unless they were elves or maybe dwarves.

It is a good example of how one or two effects with those costs can make them particularly unusual to use while still showing up dramatically. But as a general application thing, the calibration of how much is "too much" vs. how much is "not really a cost at all" is hard to judge with so large a potential pool and yet so sharp a limitation to it (once it's gone, it's gone).


But, IS there a happy middle ground, where the scaling of powerful effects for increasing costs in either age or youth are such that you can still use a few high-end effects in your career without having to retire for a while, and you can regularly (if moderately frugally) use your "everyday" effects, at least enough to remain archetypal?

[Ashtagon]

AD&D did not iirc have any magical means to reliably reduce your age. There were potions of longevity (and presumably a matching spell somewhere in a splatbook). But you had a lifetime limit on how many of those you could consume. Each one added a cumulative percentage to the chance that consuming it would reverse all of them that you had ever consumed, at which point you'd probably die from rapid ageing.

[Lord Torath]

It might be easier to treat it with the "get younger as you use it" perspective, because at least there's a built-in recovery mechanism. (You spent 1 year of age on that spell? You'll have it back in a year.)

But what would be reasonable "rates" to "charge" for varying levels of effect? How much and on what scale would the charges have to be for it to be enough to worry about spamming, but not so much that using it "reasonably" while on an adventure doesn't amount to permanently exhausting the character's resources insofar as the game's timeframe goes? (Sure, the mage who cast himself back into pubescence might recover in a decade, but the game's only going to last a few months of in-setting time.)

How would you scale it?

This could be interesting, but you'd have to specify the effects of youthenizing (yes, youthenizing. Not euthanizing ) yourself back to childhood. At some point you'd be too young to cast any more spells. To prevent immortality, you could still have a maximum age unaffected by the youthenizing process. So mages would be in their 20's for 6-7 decades before suddenly dying of old age.

Essentially, you're placing a "cooldown" time on your spellcasting. If casting a 1st-level spell youthenizes you 1 week, you can effectively only cast 1 first level spell per week. I'd expect most adventuring mages to always be right at the threshold of being too young to cast. I don't think this is a caster I'd be interested in playing.

AD&D did not iirc have any magical means to reliably reduce your age. There were potions of longevity (and presumably a matching spell somewhere in a splatbook). But you had a lifetime limit on how many of those you could consume. Each one added a cumulative percentage to the chance that consuming it would reverse all of them that you had ever consumed, at which point you'd probably die from rapid ageing.

There was also the Elixir of Youth, which removed 1d4+1 years of aging (natural or unnatural) with no risk of backlash.

[AmberVael]

But, IS there a happy middle ground, where the scaling of powerful effects for increasing costs in either age or youth are such that you can still use a few high-end effects in your career without having to retire for a while, and you can regularly (if moderately frugally) use your "everyday" effects, at least enough to remain archetypal?

I think yes. Or maybe no, it depends on how you look at it, but I think you could implement such a concept and make it work.

The problem that's been hit on here is that the passage of time in any given game is unreliable- some games might have long periods of inaction, others might not, so adjusting an exact age cost is difficult. So my thought is "lets strip out actual age as problem entirely." Basically, rather than having the immediate problem people deal with being losing years, have it be losing vitality. Having more years to your name is not necessarily the biggest problem- I knew of a man in his hundreds who was more physically sound than a lot of people half his age- but having your youth and vigor sapped away sounds pretty fearsome.

So essentially, you'd use two separate systems for this idea. One system simply costs a portion of your life, prematurely aging you. This system would not be intended as a method of balance, but more as flavor. With this in mind, you could have the cost per spell or use or what have you be relatively low. The other system represents the effects that such a drain has on you- sure, maybe you only aged a month or even a day, but that's a hit. You'd feel the difference, and it would take its toll. This second system would apply some penalty to you, whether temporary or otherwise (fatigue, pains- something aging appropriate). You'd feel that weight of time and decay pressing down on you if you used your powers too much, regardless of how much time you'd have left. This second system would be the balancing point.

The appeal to this system is that it has immediate effect. A character would be capable of interacting with the idea of the system- of the weight of age and its infirmities- without necessarily being subjected to that final toll at every single turn. It would make you have to worry less about balancing "you get this many charges of power before you drop dead" absolutely perfectly, because that wouldn't be the balancing point of the system.

[Flickerdart]

Casting off age is the metagamiest resource possible, because it's not the age of your characters that matters. Rather, it's the time frame of the campaign, because every year your character "lives" after Big Bad McGee has been vanquished is a year that you could've used to cast something.

[Kid Jake]

I find the idea of everyone looking at an 80 year old sorcerer with extra-awe, because he's got sooo much magic saved up exceptionally amusing.

[DigoDragon]

I wonder if this means all the powerful spellcasters are now elves? They'd be able to scoff at a mere 3-year cost casting a Haste spell. :3

[aspekt]

I think first you'd need a reliable means of tracking age along with its deleterious effects in the campaign that players could count in a consistent manner.

[TheCountAlucard]

youthenizing

This pun is terrible and you should feel terrible.

Shadowrun has treatments to help the rich man kick Father Time's ass - Leonization, named after explorer Ponce de Leon.

In this case, I think it's a better fit than that terrible pun.

[Lord Torath]

This pun is terrible and you should feel terrible.

Shadowrun has treatments to help the rich man kick Father Time's ass - Leonization, named after explorer Ponce de Leon.

In this case, I think it's a better fit than that terrible pun.

I'm afraid I can't take credit for that pun. That goes to the King of Puns, Pier Xanthany (Piers Anthony), author of the pun-filled Xanth series.

[Segev]

I keep wondering if "Youth In Asia" is a band.


As for the "get younger when you cast spells" effect, it probably isn't essentially required that it should FAIL to provide extended lifespan. Fiction is rife with long-lived sorcerers and wizards and witches. The sole real consequence this would have is the removal of the attractiveness of undeath and other immortlity/death-cheating schemes, since it's part and parcel of being a mage.

Particularly from a PC perspective, nobody really cares that the elf will outlive the human by generations of the latter's family tree when there isn't noticeable aging in the timespan of the game.

But that also brings up the point that, yes, if it's based on real time age, elves would be a lot better at magic just for having more leeway to store it up. On the other hand, if it's based on some sort of growth factor, such that a spell that turns a teenaged human into a pre-teen human also turning an equivalently-mature elf to an equivalent pre-adolescent maturity, elves suddenly become WORSE at it, as it takes them longer to build it up.


Magey mcMagicpants of the party, in a "you get older as you use magic" setting, would meta-game wise have little reason to not go totally nova against the BBEG at the end of the campaign; you're right about that. Still, that is not necessarily a bad thing, if that's the kind of story you want to tell: how this great sacrifice was needed to put down the villain.

I am inclined, from a gamist standpoint, to not like "get older" as the resource, precisely because it's fixed and finite. Resources are generally best in RPGs when they are finite in the short term, but recoverable (and thus infinite in the long term).

"Get younger" can function like this...provided there is a proper calibration of cost/recovery that doesn't also overly reward recklessness.

I think what we need is to establish a unit of expected spell-use per day while "adventuring" (whatever taht means for the game in question). Let's be unoriginal and call it "mana." The expected spell-use per day will net cost a mage 1 "mana." (Mana obviously can be in fractional increments, since presumably more than one spell will be cast per day.)

The next step is to determine how "mana" translates to time, both gained and lost. That is, if a mage does nothing magical all day, how many mana does he regain? This should be symmetric with how much younger he gets for spending mana. (e.g. if it's 1 mana/day, then a mage spending 1 mana each day doesn't age, while one spending 2 mana/day gets younger at the rate that most people get older, and a mage doing no magic accumulates 1 mana per day.)

I believe it to be desirable that a mage who has been out adventuring for any extended period should wish to spend downtime recovering some age. That is, if he's expected to expend 1 mana/day, he should be expected to recover less than 1 mana/day. This is because, if the game were calibrated at "mages who are actively adventuring generally don't get older or younger," then it would be pretty easy to double, triple, or even septuple the output and not have it really impact the game play over the course of most campaigns.

If we assume the average starting age of most adventuring mages is in the early 20s (let's call it 20 even just for ease of math, and for now ignore non-human age rates), then it's safe to say that there are at least 10 "years" the mage can afford to lose before he starts to really and truly be falling into "can't adventure properly" territory.

It would help if we had some defined penalties for very young age, and established where we, as designers, feel even a magically-gifted little kid with a grown-up mind is too physically weak to be out adventuring. We don't have to be precise; a ball-park will do. Design the penalties for being so little such that the ballpark becomes a sliding scale into uselessness.

Physical penalties to stats might start to rack up below age 15. Size category loss happens at ages 11, 8, 5, and 3. Lose ability to walk at 1. Lose ability to talk sometime in the 2, 1, or infancy range.

Probably a touch of slippery slope, too: as you get weaker for being smaller, if you're adventuring you'll wind up relying more and moreo n magic to do things you could have done without it, before, hastening your decline.



So with that in mind, how long should a mage's expected downtime/recovery time be between adventures? Obviously, the nature of this will make it a function of how long he was adventuring - if he spends 1 mana per day, it's a function of regained-mana-per-day to recover what he spent.

The simplest, here, would be to say, "For every day adventuring, he should need a day of rest." If N(k) is how much mana he has at the end of day k, and his expected expenditure while adventuring is fixed at 1, while he recovers r per day, then:

N(k)=N(k-1)+r-1 while adventuring.

While doing no magic at all, N(k) = N(k-1)+r.

So the rate of change in effective mana available is (r-1)/day while adventuring, and +r/day during dedicated magicless downtime.

If it takes 1 day of magicless rest per day of adventuring to stay the same net age at the end of one such cycle, then r-1 = -r.

So r would be 0.5. Or the recovery rate would be half the expected expenditure per day. Or a mage would be expected to expend 2 days' worth of age on magic every day of adventuring.

This is likely too low. It would be possibly to greatly exceed that over the course of a campaign and not reduce one's age by even 5 years. Consider that many campaigns happen over the course of a month to two years.

Let's say an intense adventure - one where PCs are expending their various resources at the expected daily rate every day - lasts between 2 and 5 days. They usually rest at least a month after that, in most "typical" dungeon-crawling games, right?

So let's say it should take 30 days to break even after spending 1 mana/day for 3 days. That would make r = 0.1 mana. Expending 1 mana per day would net cost .9 mana per day; mages who are practicing an expected amount of magic for adventuring will get 9 days younger every day of adventure.

The next step, I think, to really examining whether that's the right rate to plan for is to see how many days it would take before the youthening effect would become "noticeable." Looking again at "early 20s" as the general expected age for functional mage-class adventurers... is a year enough to be "noticeable?"

With r=0.1, it would take 40 days of "standard" adventuring for a year to fall away. 19 days if spending at twice the intended rate.

One could expend at 5x the "standard" rate and lose a whole year only after a solid week of adventuring.

So that's probably too low.


But, perhaps other mitigating factors can be added in. Maybe there's a non-linear scaling of cost to power of magic. So the "standard" rate might assume one or more 4-7 level spells, and not generally assume even 1 8-9, but assume a largish number of 0-3. Doubling the number of 8-9 level spells per day might actually do more than quintuple the amount you "expect" to spend.

[Maglubiyet]

I keep wondering if "Youth In Asia" is a band.

Yes, yes it was.

[Aedilred]

Essentially, you're placing a "cooldown" time on your spellcasting. If casting a 1st-level spell youthenizes you 1 week, you can effectively only cast 1 first level spell per week. I'd expect most adventuring mages to always be right at the threshold of being too young to cast. I don't think this is a caster I'd be interested in playing.

I guess it's horses for courses. That sounds really interesting to me. A week is perhaps a bit much for a first-level spell, but how about a scaling effect: only a day for a cantrip, but three days for a first-level; nine for a second-level; and on from there. By the time you get to sixth-level you're losing a couple of years every time you cast a spell; ninth-level spells are the sort of thing you can only do once per normal human lifetime. Perhaps vary the effects depending on the spell in question a little, and maybe mix it up by school a bit, but as a general benchmark.

At a lowish level it's really not a problem, and an adventuring wizard can easily maintain a healthy livelihood. But in high-pressure situations his magic suddenly becomes a highly finite resource, and blowing it will cost him not just for the next few days but possibly the next few decades. It gives a wizard a reason to spend a lot of time studying; not just because there's a lot of the time when he doesn't want to be casting spells, but so he can work out how to use his spells more effectively.

And when he's not saving the world or whatever he has to deal with people treating him as a kid when in fact he's twice their age and possesses the theoretical power to unmake their existence.

It wouldn't work in all campaigns; certainly if the rest of the party are humans they're not going to have time to wait ten years for him to prepare every sixth-level spell. But it could be interesting in longer-term ones with longer-lived PCs, and also help to rein in caster supremacy a bit.

[Talakeal]

I personally hate aging as a game mechanic. It doesn't serve as a balancing mechanic as most power gamers don't care about their characters age and it simply dissuades people who actually want to play a young character from RPing.

From an IC perspective reversing the process is a bit nicer as you get healthier and cuter instead of withered and decrepit, and it expands rather than shortens your time on Earth, but from a practical matter it has the exact same problems.

Most RPGs consider mortality to be sacrosanct. D&D is pretty uniform in that effects that reduce aging don't actually extend your life span, and most of the methods that legitimately expand your time on earth are branded as arbitrarily evil, unnatural, and prone to marut intervention. Even in a lot of other games where players are free to go crazy with magic like Exalted and Riddle of Steel make you jump through huge hoops to reverse aging if they are possible at all. Even in Mage, where arch-mages are so powerful a lot of their higher end spells are hard for me to even comprehend, only have extremely limited and dangerous methods of preserving or restoring youth.

[Flickerdart]

By the time you get to sixth-level you're losing a couple of years every time you cast a spell; ninth-level spells are the sort of thing you can only do once per normal human lifetime.

Anything with a cooldown timer measured in years isn't a character power, but a plot device.

[LibraryOgre]

In AD&D 1st edition, casting a haste spell aged the target by three years. Wish aged the caster by ten years iirc.

I once contemplated this as a means to kill troublesome NPCs.

Haste aged you by a year... and, if you went strictly by the rules, had a chance of killing you (since magical aging forced a system shock roll).

[veti]

I wonder if this means all the powerful spellcasters are now elves? They'd be able to scoff at a mere 3-year cost casting a Haste spell. :3

Would have been, except that 1e elves capped out at 11th level as magic-users (and couldn't be clerics at all, and clerics had some of the most punishing costs - casting a Resurrection, Regeneration or Restoration would take a few years off your life, with the result - in my early campaigns, at least - that those spells were basically non-existent, because anyone capable of casting them would demand truly colossal amounts of money for doing it. The only creatures that could cast them comfortably, per the Monster Manual, were extra-planar - which of course was one good reason for doing a deal with a devil.)

But it's being the subject of a Haste spell, not casting it, that aged you.

[LibraryOgre]

Hmmm... casting spells ages you a number of days equal to the square of the level (1 for level 1, 81 for 9th level). Wizards and clerics must keep track of a separate age, totaling up the days they've aged... which only applies for physical penalties; their real age applies for mental adjustments.

Still going to give elves and such a huge advantage. It might be interesting if different races have different reactions to spellcasting... humans age, but maybe elves take Con damage?

[Zale]

Dying of old age halfway through a game because I had the gall to use my class features does sound ever so fun, don't you think?

Any wizard worth their intelligence score will realize that the only winning move is not to play.

[Aedilred]

Dying of old age halfway through a game because I had the gall to use my class features does sound ever so fun, don't you think?

Any wizard worth their intelligence score will realize that the only winning move is not to play.

With the general tenor of normal conversation around here, I'm surprised that's seen as a problem.

So long as you're aware of the rule in advance and the campaign is adjusted to compensate, I don't see why it would be too much of an issue. It just means the wizard has to marshal their resources better and plan for the long term rather than just the next 24 hours.

It's still a trade-off many people would be prepared to make, IC: you burn your candle half as long but twice as brightly, trading longevity for glory and power. It's basically the Achilles deal.

[Lord Torath]

Dying of old age halfway through a game because I had the gall to use my class features does sound ever so fun, don't you think?

Any wizard worth their intelligence score will realize that the only winning move is not to play.

Unless you can figure out a way to let someone else take the drain for you. There was a series of books that used this mechanic, but I only read the first one, and I don't recall the title/author.

Spoiler: More plot info if you're interested

Show

There were dragon/insect things that could somehow bond with a caster and let them cast more often, and these people lived behind a magical barrier where they preyed on a simple human population. The magical barrier was erected by others to keep them away, and was slowly breaking down (I know, shocker!). Mages outside the barrier would pay others to take their drain for them, and take care of their "thrall's" families. Ring any bells?

[Segev]

One good point - amongst many - that has been brought up is the long-term resource management. That's what the issue with designing an "age" based cost-mechanic really is: it's a long-term resource, and replenishes slowly if at all.

Balancing a long-term resource is tricky. The costs have to be real enough that the long-term resource's eventual exhaustion is a concern, but low enough that it doesn't feel like every use of it is character-damaging. High enough that people won't spam it, but low enough that using it isn't a life-or-death consideration every time it comes up.

[Jay R]

I think it's a lousy mechanic. It's either going to have no effect, or it's likely to eventually make the character unplayable. Neither improves the game.

[Knaight]

There are specific games where I could see this working; outside of that specific type it gets sketchier. The big one is games that are explicitly set across generations. For instance, Pendragon will often have you playing a character, one of their children, one of their grand children, and maybe eventually one of their great grand children. If that's the paradigm in the game, aging has a real cost. The character will die before their time, and for a while the player will end up using a replacement character that is weaker. It's similar to the balancing of troupe play, almost.

With that said, the vast majority of games don't fit in that paradigm. In these more conventional games, avoid it.

[warty goblin]

Unless you can figure out a way to let someone else take the drain for you. There was a series of books that used this mechanic, but I only read the first one, and I don't recall the title/author.

Spoiler: More plot info if you're interested

Show

There were dragon/insect things that could somehow bond with a caster and let them cast more often, and these people lived behind a magical barrier where they preyed on a simple human population. The magical barrier was erected by others to keep them away, and was slowly breaking down (I know, shocker!). Mages outside the barrier would pay others to take their drain for them, and take care of their "thrall's" families. Ring any bells?

That sounds a lot like the Magister Trilogy by C.S. Friedman. I made it through the first book and part of the second, but found it generally sort of terrible.

Spoiler: Trigger Warning: Terrible Books; Vile Gender Stuff

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Although in that series the wizards just leeched onto the life force of a completely random person, and it was straight up "I'm going to suck this person dry because I want to do magic and don't feel like dying for it." No compensation or getting the consent of the abridged peasant. So basically every single main character was a serial killer. There was also some more or less annoying gender stuff - only men were psychopathic enough to do this, except for the Magic Prostitute Lady pseudo-protagonist, who had been abused enough to get in touch with her inner vampire and start sucking dudes dry. Apparently a lifetime of sexual trauma has roughly the same effect as testosterone. Who knew, right? Naturally most the male wizards also had massive superiority complexes on account of being male and sucking people dry and were therefore better than the weaker women casters - and you could sort the good mass murderers from the bad mass murderers by how patriarchal they were - so the Magic Prostitute Lady using her abuse-granted powers of non-empathy to kill random people for fun and profit was a total blow for gender equality, or something.

The plot of the first book was the protagonist woman getting her vampire-magic mojo online, and discovering that her randomly selected victim was a prince, whom in a rarity for the book wasn't a completely vile person. Only maybe 70% vile. Predictable drama ensued, everybody but the protagonist lady died, she learned the important lesson of never getting attached to the people she leeches, and is thereby rewarded with a completely anonymous peasant half a world away to drain next.

The second book remembers that this is supposed to be epic fantasy, so some bad dudes had better invade from the North post-haste. his naturally requires a vaguely repressed but totally awesome and nearly extinct culture of incredibly boring people to protect all the total psychopaths down south from the horrible things beyond the ancient magic barrier. The bad guys on the other side of the ancient magical barrier used exactly the same magic as the other wizards, but had lizard-butterfly things that let them drain more people at once if I'm remembering right. So basically if the bad guys won the entire world would be enslaved by a hegemony of nearly immortal spellcasters who ate people's life-force like breathmints. If the guys with the lizard-butterflies won, it would be exactly the same, but a lot less civilized about it. Since by this point I hated basically everybody, and foresaw some sort of boring socio-economic commentary coming up, I jumped ship at about this point.

Yeah, skip that series. At least Terry Goodkind made it an entire book or so before his heroes became essentially indistinguishable from the villains.